East Grand Plains

East Grand Plains is an area south of Roswell, NM. Of all the places we lived in New Mexico, this is the one clearest in my memory. I suppose that is because it was where we were living when the decision to move to Texas was made. I was nine years old when we went to Pharr. We lived in a couple of places in the area. Mother says we first lived in a shack belonging to some people named Barnes. I remember the Barnes son, Travis, mainly because he had his tonsils out in the same doctor's office we had ours taken out. Anyway, I think this shack was north of the EGP school, but I'm not sure. I remember one occasion when our cousin Eugene Thornton came to visit. He was older than we were, and I didn't like him much. Maybe this is why. He asked us if we wanted to see him make a match burn twice. Of course, ignorant girls that we were, we said sure. I may have been about 6 years old then. He then proceeded to strike the match, making it burn once. Then he blew the fire out, and pressed the hot match to my arm thus making it "burn twice". UGH!

We moved from the shack to a very nice house south of the school. This was a farm owned by Clyde Groceclose, a friend of Mother and Daddy's. Daddy became a share cropper. He farmed and harvested the crops for a portion of the profits. I remember that there was a line of cherry trees on the road running from our house to the neighbors to the east. There was also a resevoir between our houses. One day while going from one house to the other along the path by the reservoir, I saw a huge snake. Daddy said it was a King snake and wouldn't have hurt me. I didn't like it, anyway.

Daddy grew cantaloupes, tomatoes, and black-eyed peas, among other crops. I remember these because we would harvest them and then take them to the Farmer's Market on East Second Street in Roswell to sell. I remember riding on the disc behind the tractor when Daddy was plowing in order to make the furrows deep. I also remember picking the caterpillars off of the tomatoes and killing them with clods of dirt.

We had no indoor bathroom in this house, and we would get to take a bath once a week - usually on Saturday night to get ready for church the next day. Mother would bring in the big galvanized tub and fill it with warm water, then we would, one at a time, jump in the tub and get scrubbed.

One Christmas when we lived there Mother gave us dolls and clothes for them that she had made herself. Another Christmas we got clothes. I remember I got a pink skirt with turquoise figures in it, along with a turquoise sweater. I loved that outfit! Of course Mother had made the skirt herself. The sweater was probably the first store-bought article of clothing I ever had. Speaking of Christmas....at one time when we were small, the Boggs families drew names for gifts. The grownups would draw among themselves, then the kids. We had several cousins our age at that time. There were Jerry, Sherry, and Charlotte Gay (we called her Gay) who were the children of Mother's twin brother Louis. Then there were Larry and Barbara, daughters of Delbert, another of Mother's brothers. I think maybe Pam was born by then, the first daughter of Emaline, Mother's sister. Her other two brothers, Roy Lee and Vernie Ray were too young to be married at the time. I remember the one Christmas we drew names because Barbara got my name, and when we opened our gifts, mine was a pair of cotton panties. I guess I never liked my Aunt Elanor after that. I was so disappointed, because the other girls were getting pretty bracelets or combs, etc. I remember I hid my panties and wouldn't tell what I got! My worst Christmas!!

We were living at EGP during WWII, I know, because there was a prisoner of war camp at Dexter, just down the road from where we were. Daddy contracted to have some of the prisoners, who were Germans, come to the farm and work. I remember them arriving in the back of a big truck. One of the prisoners became friendly with Mother and Daddy. His name was Bruno Gatermann. After the war ended, Mother got a letter from Ann Marie Gatermann, Bruno's wife, in 1946. She was trapped in East Germany with their three children while Bruno was in West Germany. Eventually she and the children escaped to the West and were reunited as a family. In 1975 Bruno and Ann Marie came to the US with one of their sons who was a doctor. They visited with Mother and Daddy in Missouri where we had land at that time. Bruno was an artist and did watercolors. He gave each of us a picture he had painted. I don't remember what happend to mine.

We were all attending the East Grand Plains school during this time - Norma, Carole, and I. I remember the school very well. I remember Norma's teacher, Mrs. Klauntz. There were two teacher who were twins and I thought they were very pretty. I think one was named "JIM", which was a funny name for a woman! I think this was when I picked up my love of the mystery genre. I know I had read every Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and Hardy Boys book in the school library before I was nine years old. I had also read the Elsie Dinsmore books, which made me cry! Poor Elsie, the poor little rich orphan! I only remember the names of two of my classmates: Linda Heine and Yvonne or Yvette Whitehead. They were richer than we were as their fathers own their farms while our father was simply a tenant farmer, but they were nice. Kathy is working now in a law office in Roswell with Linda Heine's son, Eric Coll. Kathy says Linda remembers me, too. The school had the only concrete sidewalks in the area, so everyone would go to the school on weekends to skate. There was a big auditorium on a little rise to the west of the school building, and we could coast down the sidewalk slanting from the auditorium to the school. There was a little store across the street to the east from the school that sold school supplies, candy, etc. I remember most the licorice whips we could get - I think two for a penny. A penny was about all we had to spend in those days! I really loved those licorice sticks!

There were swings in the playground at the school, and I remember once I was swinging and someone - probably some mean boy - came up behind me and pushed me so hard I fell out of the swing. I still have a small scar on my forehead from that incident. One day we were outside the house playing on the car. We would climb up to the roof, then slide down the windshield to the hood. We were't supposed to do it, of course, but being kids, we did it anyway. On this particular day the car must have been really slippery because Carole came sliding down to the hood and kept on going to the ground. She broke her collar bone! Poor Carole, I think, was accident prone. She always had something wrong.

We would "go to town" to Roswell every Saturday night to go shopping and maybe see a movie, or to visit Mama and Grandaddy Boggs or Grandma Bagwell. One night when we were returning home, I saw a ghost!! We had to cross a railroad track as we turned off the Dexter/Roswell highway to get to our house. I looked down the railroad track and saw something white floating along the tracks. Everyone said it was just some paper blowing in the wind or some such, but I KNOW it was a ghost!!

During this period I also remember Aunt Pearl and Uncle Babe Goad. Aunt Pearl was Mama Boggs' sister. They lived between EGP and Roswell, off the Dexter/Roswell highway in a pretty house surrounded by grass and trees. It was a very pretty spot. Uncle Babe was a big man and Aunt Pearl was very tiny. She had red hair. They had just one child, a son named Robert. I always enjoyed visiting with them. One of Daddy's sisters, Aunt Leoder, also lived in the area. She and Uncle Luther Thornton and the detestable Eugene lived in a large old house with a porch that ran all around the house. I remember Aunt Leoder had one of those wind-up phonographs that played big thick records. We would wind and wind, and listen to the music. Aunt Leoder would always give us hot tea for breakfast.

We were members of the Calvary Baptist Church in Roswell. Mama Boggs was the Young People's teacher. I remember so many of those young people who were a little younger than Mother and Daddy. There was Helen Naron, the Groceclose girls who were very pretty, Willis Savage, who married Helen Naron, Dorothy Martin who became our aunt when she married Daddy's brother Raymond, Aunt Ruth, Ray Martin who became Uncle Ray when he married Daddy's sister Ruth (no relation to Dorothy Martin), and Vernie Ray and Roy Lee, Mother's brothers. We have a picture of that class, along with the pastor, Brother Brister. I thought his wife was one of the prettiest ladies I ever knew. She had blond hair and was very sweet. Several times the Bristers would come out to our house for Sunday dinner, and I always looked forward to that. We would usually have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, vegetables of some kind, and the crowning glory - HOME MADE ROLLS! Oh, they smelled and tasted so good. They were not that easy to make, so we had them only on special occasions.

It was due to the produce Daddy raised on the farm that we eventually moved to Texas. Most of the produce, especially the cantaloupes, grown on the farms were sold to a packer and shipper named Mr. Post. He had packing sheds all over, and had one in the Rio Grande Valley. I think Daddy wanted more for us than being the daughters of a share-cropper, so he decided to follow Mr. Post's advice and try for a better life in Texas. Incidentally, the twin sister of Great-Grandmother Boggs (Grandaddy Boggs' mother) lived in Mission, Texas at the time. I remember visiting her at one time after we moved to the Valley. The story of our life in the Valley is another long one, which will be told.